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|
| Among the philosophic chemists of this century M.
| Chevreul holds a distinguished place. His Recherches
| sur les Corps Gras d’Origine Animale (1823) and his
| Considerations Generales sur l’Analyse Organique
| (1824), although now distanced by the rapid advance
| of science, are still consulted with profit, and cited with
| respect by men eminent both in the speculative and
| practical departments of chemistry. His work on
| Colocces has made his name even popular, for it has
| been studied with admiration by a public larger than the
| special public of scientific men. A new work by such a man,
| and on a subject of very general interest, will be certain to
| command attention; and we hasten therefore to report on it,
| in order to prevent the reader’s disappointment should he
| be eager to peruse the book on the strength of the author’s
| name.
| These Lettres a M. Villemain consist of eleven
| letters preceeded by a feeble Academci Discourse, a letter
| to the Industrial Society of Angers, and a note from M.
| Villemain. In the Lettres M. Chevreul undertakes
| to expound certain ideas on Method which will be found in
| his unpublished work, De l’Abstraction consideree
| comme element des connaissances humaines,
| whenever that Organon shall appear. Hitherto,
| he has refused to publish this important work, fearing lest
| the public should refuse to listen to him if he once quit the
| particular line in which his reputation has been made. This
| fear may not be without foundation; nevertheless, we
| cannot help thinking he would have acted more prudently
| in braving the indifference or scepticism of the world than
| in disappointing his admirers, and giving the public just
| grounds for suspicion by such a feeble volume as the one
| now lying before us. Better to have risked the book than to
| have prattled thus about it.
| We are not greatly struck with what these Lettres
| communicate respecting the inedited work. The
| author’s definition of Fact, upon which he lays great stress,
| seems to us far from satisfactory, but we quite agree with
| him that the confusion which exists in scientific treatises,
| no less than in popular language, respecting the real
| nature of Fact, is fertile in error. Nothing at first seems
| simpler than to determine what constitutes a fact. Nothing,
| however, is often more abstruse. The Fact is the whole
| truth, and, consequently, is frequently excessively complex.
|

“I am cold,” “I am mortal,” “the earth revolves round
| the sun,”

are facts, varying in degrees of complexity
| ~~ the first being direct, and immediately known; the
| second being indirect, and mediately known; the third
| being the result of a long and complicated chain of
| inferences. Everyone
| practically acquainted with a science is aware how very
| delusive are the simple seeming facts, how difficult it is to
| keep clearly in view the point of separation where fact
| ceases and inference begins, and how prone we all are to
| take what is only inferential as equally valid with what
| directly certain. Thus in Clairvoyance, Spirit Rapping, and
| Table Turning (to allude only to popular delusions), how
| many

“well attested facts”

are confidently cited by
| persons who fail to perceive that these

“facts”

are
| bundles of fact and hypothesis! Thus also it is that every
| absurd doctrine has abundance of

“facts”

to
| support it; whereas, facts being truths, no
| absurd doctrine can really claim them ~~ a doctrine being
| only a logical formula expressing the meaning of the facts.
| So little is the inferential nature of almost every

“fact”
|

understood by the public, that we constantly hear men
| gravely offer personal respectability as a guarantee for
| scientific accuracy. The Frenchman assured his friend that
| the earth did turn round the sun, mot parole
| d’honneur! and persons

“of the highest integrity”
|

vouch for the facts of clairvoyance and table-turning,
| not recognising the immense difficulty of ascertaining the
| facts. A table turns that is a fact. The cause of its turning is
| not obvious, nevertheless

“respectable witnesses”
|

vouch for the fact that it turns

merely
| by two or three persons placing their hands on the table
| without pressure,”

Here ignorance flies to hypothesis
| for explanation, and calls its hypothesis a fact, when in
| truth the only ascertained fact is that the table has changed
| its position, though the cause of the change is not obvious.
| So little of direct fact is there in what appear to be the
| simplest cases, that any mind, investigating the subject
| closely, will perceive that by far the larger proportion of
| every so-called fact is inferential. Take a simple case. The
| streets are sloppy, and on stepping from our house to the
| pavement, we say

“It has rained.”

This is no fact,
| but an inference. The fact merely is that the streets
| are wet. Unless we have stood under the rain, or
| seen it pattering down, we have only a well-grounded
| inference to justify our assertion that

“it has rained.”
|

The wet streets, the dripping umbrellas, the running
| spouts, the swollen gutters, are all facts which give the
| inference fresh assurance, because they are facts which
| have on former occasions been noticed as concomitants of
| rain; but in strict language, the fact

“it has rained,”

| is and must always be an inference.
| M. Chevreul appears to us only partially to have seen the
| real difficulty of rightly estimating a fact. His definition is
| defective; he actually accepts the ordinary definition ~~
| namely,

“A fact is that which is, which has been, or
| which will be,”

and thinks it only needs development
| to make it perfect. We deem it vicious ab initio.
| In the development which he suggests, there are several
| points of importance, but they by no means rectify the
| original mistake of confounding fact with inference.
| Glancing at Physics, he finds Matter to be identical with
| certain properties ~~ extension, impenetrability, weight,
| solidity &c.; and the study of these general properties
| constitutes the science of Physics. Chemistry studies these
| general properties in more special forms, reducing matter
| to types, every one of which is defined by an assemblage
| of properties belonging to it alone. Now a fact, he says,
| being the expression of we cannot refuse to
| admit that the properties of matter are facts; and farther,
| inasmuch as these properties are abstractions,
| the conclusion is inevitable, that a fact is an abstraction.
| This is the result to which his theorizing has conducted
| him~~ this is the definition which is to be the basis of his
| great work. Difficult and delicate as the task is of producing
| an adequate definition of fact, we think few readers will
| compliment M. Chevreul on the success of his attempt.
| On the question of Method, he is more successful,
| although touching it in a fragmentary style. The letter of
| Analysis and Synthesis is excellent throughout. In it he
| refutes the very popular prejudice in favour of Synthesis as
| the more philosophic, the more potent, the more creative
| process. In the loose jargon of the day, analysis is spoken
| of as

“cold,” “mechanical,”

the process of

| “inferior minds,”

We are not told that synthesis is

| “hot,”

but in all other respects it is supposed to be
| superior to analysis ~~ it is that which distinguishes

| “creative genius.”

Every reader must remember pages
| of rhetorical nonsense on this theme. Many may have been
| rather captivated by the classification of epochs into the
| analytical and synthetical. But such classifications are
| essentially false. All knowledge, all invention, presupposes
| analysis. The imperfection of our minds prevents our
| knowing anything by immediate intuition. Divide et
| impera. Not only does invention presuppose analysis,
| but any mere analysis presupposes great
| invention in the analyst ~~ as the rhetoricians who are
| magniloquent upon synthesis would know, if they knew
| what they were talking about. When once the analysis has
| been made, it can be made again with ease; just as a
| synthesis once made can with ease be repeated. But an
| analytical discovery taxes the imagination quite as much as
| a synthetical discovery. When it is said that a particular
| epoch is synthetical, and that that is its glory, two
| propositions may be meant ~~ either that in such an epoch
| analysis had exhausted its office, and nothing remained for
| it to perform (which is absurd), or else, that owing to the
| activity of analysis, a vast quantity of new material had
| been prepared ready for synthetical combination. But this
| is not to glorify one method at the expense of the other.
| Every true synthesis must be preceded by an analysis; if
| the man who makes the analysis does not himself make
| the synthesis, one of his contemporaries is certain to do it
| for him. The two methods are twins.
| We have, in these few sentences, given the spirit of M.
| Chevreul’s remarks, which are too long for extract; and
| here we must close our notice of a book which, though not
| without merit, is very much beneath the deserved
| reputation of the author.